Tag: weight loss

Monday Musings

Margaret1 Comment

Mondays
How quickly a Monday will roll around but how much a Friday can drag its feet. I know time doesn’t really speed up the older one gets, but it really seems that way. What really gets me is when I think something was five or six years ago, but it was 20 or more. What I find a little funny is a young mother who has a baby and at six months, she posts a photo on Facebook with the caption,”Time slow down!” on social media. They ain’t seen nothing yet. Happy Monday to you! It’s going to be a grand week!

Social Media
Another thing I find funny is people on Facebook who announce they are leaving, but if they do, they’re back in a day or two. Usually the folks who stay gone don’t announce it. They are probably smarter than me. I’m sure the people who announce it have the best intentions, but there is a draw to the connections social media gives us. I like keeping up people who live life out loud. Sometimes. There are times when I learn a bit too much about them, and I find my self thinking, “I don’t believe I’da told that!” Then there was the time I saw a photo of a boss who I’d only previously seen in a suit and tie in shorts on his Facebook…I can’t explain why it made me cringe.

Photography
I’ve had a hankering to get back into photography lately, so I am in the market for a new camera. I got a Nikon a couple of years ago, and I never really liked it. The nice first camera I had was a Kodak, and I have been the most pleased with the photos from that camera. I literally wore that camera out. We went to the Amish community in Ethridge, Tennessee Saturday, and since I’m in the mood for photography, I’ll post some photos from another trip below.

Weight Loss Monday
Reflecting back to last Monday’s post, I picked five goals for five days and I did pretty well sticking to it. I am picking another five this week, some the same. If you didn’t do as well as you would have liked last week or over the weekend, it’s Monday! A new day, a great day! Rejoice! Be glad! Pick five things and commit to following through for five little days! You can do it! To help get you started with your goals, here are a few suggestions:

  • Start off with smaller portions.
  • Slow down!   Chew more.   Put that fork down or take a drink between bites. Enjoy your food…easy to do when you slow down.
  • Remind yourself often, “I am not a glutton. I am free from the chains of sin because of the cross of Jesus Christ.”
  • No sugar (cookies, cakes, candy) or junk food (chips, colas, snack crackers, etc.) It’s just five days!
  • Read Scripture every day.
  • Move more…take more steps on purpose.
  • Click Here for more suggestions.
Photos from my stash: Amish Community, Ethridge, Tennessee

Weight Loss for Christians…because it’s Monday.

Margaret8 Comments

Do you really want to know how to lose weight?
Just do it.

I can’t think of a sin other than gluttony that I have ever condoned continuing until Monday. If I say a not-nice word when I stub my toe, I don’t walk around the rest of the day dropping F bombs because I said “gosh darn it” (or worse) before breakfast. I don’t spend the weekend cussing everyone out, even if they make me mad. If I realize there was a tube of lipstick under my purse in my shopping cart that I didn’t pay for, I take it back inside immediately. I don’t go on a shop-lifting spree.

But somehow it’s permissible to be a glutton, at least until Monday. Maybe I stopped for a high calorie, high fat fast food combo breakfast, and after berating myself, I would think, “I might as well pig out for the rest of the day and start again tomorrow.” However, “the rest of the day” normally lasted until…Monday. And on Monday, I would try one of the various diets, or if I was feeling a little more industrious, one of the “lifestyle changes” I’d tried and failed at many times before. Diets are bad for your mental health. All of them.

I say this all the time because it’s true: If you want to lose weight, find the way that works for you, and do that. Other than the first week or two, it is going to be a slow process. Accept that truth and move toward a healthier you. When you are healthier, you feel better. When you feel better you have more confidence. With more confidence, you find yourself stepping out and doing God’s will for your life in an open and public way, living your life so that others desire the Christ in you.

Today is Monday..but it wouldn’t matter if it was Saturday. Somebody said it well years ago:

Today is the first day
of the rest of your life.

  • If your first thought is “I can’t do this.” You are wrong, Jesus says you can. You are free because Christ paid the highest price for your freedom. You may not feel free right now, but as a believer, your first job is to believe what God’s word says about you: If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed (John 8:36) Also: The Messiah has set us free so that we may enjoy the benefits of freedom. So keep on standing firm in it, and stop putting yourselves under the yoke of slavery again. (Galatians 5:1 ISV) Stop being a slave to your appetite!
  • Step Two is to stop making it about the weight. Yes, you need to be the healthiest version of you, but stop making the number on the scale or the view in the mirror your main focus. Make Relationship with your creator your number one priority.
  • If your Monday finds you automatically planning to go on the same diet you’ve tried 130 times before “because it is the only thing that works for you,” but you are still overweight and obsessing about the number on the scale, time 131 won’t work, either. The truth is that diets don’t work. A successful, happy life comes from one better choice after another. Stop thinking you can’t and KNOW that you really are in control of your flesh! Your flesh only calls the shots when you let it. God didn’t give us a free will to have us hand it over to the greed of our appetites! Get pumped knowing you get to call all the shots when it comes to what goes into your mouth. Instead of giving in with “I know I shouldn’t” and popping it in your mouth, end that thought with, “so I am not going to today.” Get used to being the boss! You can do it!
  • Spend some time getting to know yourself, specifically foods you like and foods you don’t. When did eating a grapefruit you don’t like for breakfast ever lead to health or weight loss? When you are free to eat  normal servings of foods you like, you won’t spend most of your day obsessing over every morsel that goes into your mouth.
  • Get off the junk food. If you are eating sweets, chips, and fast food all the time, you will not want healthy food. You will want more sugar and high fatty food. That’s a fact. It’s like your spiritual food…if you fill up on junk TV and cheating songs, you aren’t going to want to sit down and study God’s word. Reading the Bible is imperative for a healthy relationship with the One who can make you all He planned for you to be.

It’s Monday. Take the next five days and commit to some better choices. Choose four or five of the following (or make up your own) and COMMIT to those choices. You can do anything for five days! And maybe you’ll find yourself on the way to some better habits….and weight loss. The goal here is to get accustomed to a healthier lifestyle and begin to do it automatically. We aren’t trading one obsession (all can I eat in a day) for the obsession of monitoring every bite you take. Next week, spend less time thinking about your next meal, it and more living your good life.  Good decision examples:

  • Give a sincere, head bowed, eyes closed blessing over your food, not just a quick “Thank you, Lord,” as you pop the first bite in your mouth. Take a moment of true gratitude. Not everyone has something to eat today.
  • Start off with smaller portions.
  • Don’t eat from the package.
  • Slow down!   Chew more.   Put that fork down between bites.
  • Eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full. You can more easily ascertain when you are getting if you are eating slowly. (However, if you plan to eat at noon, and you experience a hunger pang at 11 a.m., make your flesh wait until noon. You are in control!)
  • Remind yourself often, “I am not a glutton. I am free from the chains of sin because of the cross of Jesus Christ.”
  • No sugar (cookies, cakes, candy)
  • No junk food (chips, colas, snack crackers, etc.)
  • Choose to not be a glutton…which is a LOT easier with no sugar and no junk food.
  • Read scripture every day, even if it is just one Psalm or one chapter in Proverbs. (This should be a life-long commitment, even if you are extremely busy, or on vacation, or whatever.) If you are going to skip something, skip a meal, not Scripture.
  • Enjoy your food…again, easy to do when you slow down.
  • Don’t eat a meal in your car.
  • Pack your lunch instead of eating it in a restaurant.
  • Skip the fast food, even the “healthy” options.
  • Eat at least two healthy choices per day, such as a fruit and a vegetable.
  • Fast lunch every day Monday – Friday. Use that time in Bible study and prayer.
  • Fast for 24 hours:  An easy first-time way to do that is sundown to sundown.
  • Get educated on nutrition, not diets, so that you can make informed decisions about what you are eating, and let good choices become a habit.
  • Move. Walk more. Make a real effort to just move more. Use your fitbit or Garmin, or buy a good pedometer and walk at least 5000 steps, which is much easier than you think.

Which four or five do you choose? Remember, the goal is change, not losing weight. Losing weight is a side effect of the ever-elusive change we crave. This is one of the few times a side effect is desirable! You are in control! You can make some good choices and start a new life today so that “healthier” becomes second nature. Your first nature should be the nature of Jesus Christ.

Stop trying to lose weight. Start working on changing your focus. Your best you is the you God wrote about in His book. (Psalm 139:16)

My photos are from Rock Springs Nature Trail, Natchez Trace Parkway.

Ten Great Reasons To Ditch That Diet!

Margaret7 Comments

Dieting!  Dieting!   It’s just a bore!
I try and fail, then try some more.
Limited portions and watching fat,
Counting calories and things like that,
But all I ever really do
Is seem to gain a pound or two!

I grew weary with diets several years ago…here are my top ten reasons to ditch the diet:

Number Ten: Being on a diet is like carrying around a 70-pound backpack full of loud little gremlins who are always poking you in the back and sides reminding you that “you can’t eat that!”  You carry that baggage with you everywhere you go.

Number Nine: You can’t relax at a party and enjoy socializing because you hear the party food talking in one ear (“Remember how good I taste!”) and the diet snickering in the other ear (“Hahaha!!  You can’t eat that!”)

Number Eight: You don’t enjoy a meal out with friends because your diet-mode brain churns the whole time.  Brain waves bounce from “Which entree is the safest choice?” to mentally berating yourself because you made a not-so-good decision.   The rest of the meal is spend having conversations in your head with every bite about how you get back on that diet tomorrow.

Number Seven: Tomorrow rarely comes. You wake up one day and realize you’ve spent your whole life on a diet, thinking about a diet, or breaking a diet.

Number Six: When tomorrow does come, you pick up the backpack and repeat the process, often eating foods you don’t even like. 

Number Five: Food rules you because your life is centered around the calories, fat grams and carbs, with the hope that this is the diet that will finally work, and you’ll be all it promised you would be.

Number Four: Dieting makes you believe that you can accomplish weight loss quickly, so you weigh every day only to find yourself discouraged because the scales are barely moving, or going up instead of down.  Then you console yourself with comfort food.

Number Three: Being on a diet takes away the reality that averaging a 5 pound loss a month is 60 pounds in a year…which is far better than failing on 5 or more diets, and ending the year with a gain of 15. 

Number Two: Beating yourself up for breaking your diet cannot be counted as exercise.

And the Number One Reason to Ditch That diet: It never worked before…I can’t see Diet Number 1,152,484 working, either.

When you realize you’ve dieted for years and still find yourself in bigger clothes than last year, it’s time change your focus.  It’s not about the weight.  It’s about the focus.  Come visit me tomorrow…we’ll talk about that.
UPDATE: I started watching the State of the Union address, and lost my focus… Hopefully I will have the post read on Friday!

Where is My Head?

Margaret4 Comments

Where is my head?  On my shoulders, of course!  It’s my mind that I sometimes lose.  There are days when it takes a walk without me. 

Other than writing my story, I haven’t written about losing weight or getting healthy, which is one of the main reasons I started “In Quest of Truth.” In this chaotic world where there is so much going on, I find myself thinking America needs my two cents worth, and I write about current events.  (America doesn’t need my two cents worth…we need prayer!)

In this blog, where I intend to be open…which is hard for me at times…I want to share how much God is involved in our lives personally if we let Him.  Food has been a life long struggle for me! Freedom has taken care of the sugar struggle, but I find I have a lot of bad habits to combat. God is faithful and has not left me to my own devices.  

I really must get to a point where I bring all of my scattered thoughts together and share what Jesus is doing for me on this Freedom Road.   Don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s about the calories and exercise.  It’s about far, far more. 

My five minutes were up a minute ago, so let me end with what my friend said to me earlier today: 

“Jesus, take the spoon!” 

See more FMF “Where” posts HERE <<clicky